OpenAI Staff (including Sutskever) Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns

There is an updated list of 702 who have signed the letter (as of the time I'm writing this) here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/technology/letter-to-the-open-ai-board.html (direct link to pdf: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f31ff522a5b1ad7a/9cf7eda3-full.pdf)

Nick Cammarata left OpenAI ~8 weeks ago, so he couldn't have signed the letter.

Out of the remaining 6 core research contributors:

• 3/6 have signed it: Steven Bills, Dan Mossing, and Henk Tillman
• 3/6 have still not signed it: Leo Gao, Jeff Wu, and William Saunders

Out of the non-core research contributors:

• 2/3 signed it: Gabriel Goh and Ilya Sutskever
• 1/3 still have not signed it: Jan Leike

That being said, it looks like Jan Leike has tweeted that he thinks the board should resign: https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1726600432750125146

And that tweet was liked by Leo Gao: https://twitter.com/nabla_theta/likes

Still, it is interesting that this group is clearly underrepresented among people who have actually signed the letter.

Edit: Updated to note that Nick Cammarata is no longer at OpenAI, so he couldn't have signed the letter. For what it's worth, he has liked at least one tweet that called for the board to resign: https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/likes

The only evidence I've seen that this is real, so far, is Kara Swisher's (who?) word, and not having heard a refutation yet, but neither of those things are very reassuring given that Kara's thread bears The Mark:

I am also confused. It would make me happy if we got some relevant information about this in the coming days.

This is the wrong way to think about this, and an even worse way to write about this. 

I think this comment is closing the overton window on extremely important concepts, in a really bad way. There probably isn't a "deep state", we can infer that the US Natsec establishment is probably decentralized a la lc's Don't take the organization chart literally [LW · GW] due to the structure of the human brain, and I've argued that competent networks of people emerge stochastically based on technological advances [LW · GW] like better lie detection technology, whereas Gwern argued that competence mainly emerges based on proximity to the core leadership and leadership's wavering focus [LW(p) · GW(p)].

I've argued pretty persuasively that there's good odds that excessively powerful people at tech companies and intelligence agencies might follow the national interest [LW · GW], and hijack or damage the AI safety community [LW · GW] in order to get better positioned to access AI tech.

I'm really glad to see people take this problem seriously, and I'm frankly pretty disturbed that the conflict I sketched out might have ended up happening so soon after I first went public about it a month ago [LW · GW]. I think your comment also gets big parts of the problem right e.g. "events at the AI frontier are not something that the national security elite can just allow to unfold unattended" which is well-put. 

But everything is on fire right now, and people have unfairly high standards for getting everything right the first time (it is even more unfair for the world which is ending). Like learning a language, a system as obscure and complicated as this required me to make tons of mistakes before I had something ready for presentation.

You are attributing a lot more deviousness and strategic boldness to the so-called deep state than the US government is organizationally capable of. The CIA may have tried a few things like this in banana republics but there's just no way anybody could pull it off domestically.

I don't understand the mechanism of the double-cross here. How would they get the pro-EA and safety side to trigger the crisis? And why would the safety/EA people, who are trying to make everything more predictable and controllable, be the ones who are purged from influence?

Seems unlikely they'd need to communicate at all. The stock market is plenty of pressure on Microsoft.

Seeing repeated theories about the “deep-state” by supposed EA members is not a good look, for EA especially now.

The mundane explanation: a bunch of inexperienced people, some of whom probably should have never been on the board, severely miscalculated the consequences of their actions due to a combination of good-will, ego, and greed.

A research team's ability to design a robust corporate structure doesn't necessarily predict their ability to solve a hard technical problem. Maybe there's some overlap, but machine learning and philosophy are different fields than business. Also, I suspect that the people doing the AI alignment research at OpenAI are not the same people who designed the corporate structure (but this might be wrong).

Welcome to LessWrong! Sorry for the harsh greeting. Standards of discourse are higher than other places on the internet, so quips usually aren't well-tolerated (even if they have some element of truth).